Wednesday, October 05, 2016

Whatever are we going to do about this army of Volunteer Auxiliary Thought Police who are occupied with memory-holing history?

Last week, you could still find on Wikipedia two of Ms. Machado’s more recent misadventures:

In 2005, Machado was engaged to baseball star Bobby Abreu. During their engagement she was on the Spanish reality show ‘La Granja’ where she was filmed on camera having sex with another member of the show. Shortly after the video surfaced Abreu ended their engagement.

On June 25, 2008, Machado gave birth to her daughter, Dinorah Valentina. She issued a statement that the father of Dinorah was her best friend Mexican businessman Rafael Hernandez Linares after Mexican news sources, quoting the Attorney General, reported that the father was Gerardo Álvarez Vázquez, a drug lord.

But mentions of these imbroglios have since been memory holed on Wikipedia. Editors have offered bizarre excuses for deleting the most interesting information about Hillary’s heroine, such as that the diva is not a “public figure,” an assertion that would surely wound the actress more deeply than allegations that she’s a gangster’s moll.

That points out an answer to one of the more obvious questions about the plausibility of Orwell’s 1984: How can they afford that? Is it really fiscally feasible even for a totalitarian government to employ an army of salaried Winston Smiths to alter history?

Yet it’s naive to imagine that a government would have to pay people to do this kind of thing. In the current year, we now know that plenty of people would join the Volunteer Auxiliary Thought Police for free.

How very unfortunate. Now, thanks to Wikipedia's ever-efficient thought police, no one will ever know the truth about Ms Machado. It's not as if there is anything we can do about it, right?

Heh, Bobby Abreu was a very good hitter, surprised he dropped his average by hittin' that. Watched him for years as a Philly; he kept his residence in NYC while he was a Philly so not like he didn't have plenty of options.

Is there going to be an option on pages for flash memes? I'm talking specifically about occurrences that happen in culture (be it art, sports, politics, etc.) that are notable for being unexpected or just naturally humorous (think along the lines of someone changing the ownership on Gawker's wiki page from "GM/Univision" to "Hulk Hogan").

The Wiki Thought Police are notorious for removing (even from edit history) a lot of those entries.

Read through the security system against a SJW takeover and it sounds quite interesting. Whatever holes are in it, I'm confident the game developer mindset will fix them quite fast.

Awesome to read about bringing Brave, Gap and corporations abroad. For Wikipedia it smells like big trouble. And not just for Wikipedia, the connections with Gap and Brave have a nice pull effect. Very well done guys.

Wow, Infogalactic, Brave, Gab.ai....waiting to see what other arrows are in the quiver.

Longer term threat is the impending handover of management of the Internet to the UN. There may have to be a concerted effort to create workarounds like Mesh infrastructure to bypass higher level attacks (what will you be able to do if domain names, naming conventions or DNS suddenly are unavailable or under attack by UN Kleptocrats?

It's been two weeks since I applied for Gab under another, more frequently used email address. I received a response that I was in the queue but nothing since. When I tried to register again a pop up said my email address was already taken. Not sure what to do. I also downloaded Brave and love it. Telling all my friends about it, too.

>The Gamergate controversy centers on the harassment campaign conducted primarily through the use of the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate, revolving around issues of sexism and progressivism in video game culture.>harassment campaign

This might need some work. (Yes, I know work in progress, not officially announced yet, dread ilk involved in more important things, some stuff is just copy pastas of wikipedia, etc. Still funny.)

@22 at the open Brainstorm on Monday it was discussed that gab invites are often ending up in spam or social folders, especially for Gmail users.

It was also mentioned that about 70k folks are on the wait list and invitations are being sent in batches of about 10k at a time. I don't speak for anyone at gab, but that's what was publicly discussed, so I feel comfortable passing it along.

B.J. wrote:How do you plan to differentiate yourselves from Conservapedia and Rationalwiki, i.e. avoid the reputation as another bunch of cranks and kooks?

Are you aware that this reputation is the result of a CIA operation to tar political opposition as kooks? If this encyclopedia is opposed to globalism and effective, it will be described as kooky, full stop.

How do you plan to differentiate yourselves from Conservapedia and Rationalwiki, i.e. avoid the reputation as another bunch of cranks and kooks?

By providing the user with the ability to see the perspective he chooses rather than imposing any one particular perspective on him. Unlike Wikipedia, Conservapedia, and RationalWiki, we won't play thought police. This is an entirely new paradigm.

An encyclopedia that "is opposed to globalism" would just be another useless echo chamber. What we need is a factual encyclopedia that is free of globalist influence, because that is a useful tool against globalism.

By providing the user with the ability to see the perspective he chooses rather than imposing any one particular perspective on him. Unlike Wikipedia, Conservapedia, and RationalWiki, we won't play thought police. This is an entirely new paradigm.

This is fun. I am looking forward to the names you give the perspectives.

VD wrote:How do you plan to differentiate yourselves from Conservapedia and Rationalwiki, i.e. avoid the reputation as another bunch of cranks and kooks?

By providing the user with the ability to see the perspective he chooses rather than imposing any one particular perspective on him. Unlike Wikipedia, Conservapedia, and RationalWiki, we won't play thought police. This is an entirely new paradigm.

Read the Roadmap.

I see, preference filtering. Very interesting. Looking forward to the future of this project.

VD wrote:Explain. What do you mean and what sort of mechanism do you recommend. I have no conceptual problem with it, but the devil is often in the details.

It's something I may have to look into. Basically, much like what happens on a notable Wiki page, you get folks that are snarky who get in on the page and modify something (be it in the attribute box or some other anecdote) based on a freak occurrence or some other notable event (i.e. Hulk Hogan "owns" Gawker, observation made during last night's VP debate, etc.).

Point is, unlike the Wiki Thought Police, you you don't get rid of the content. If it's particularly amusing (legitimately speaking, getting rid of active trolling should always be acceptable), such content should be moved after a certain period of time (say 48 hours) into a separate section entitled "Memes" or something like that, along with a quick blurb as to why it was notable.

It's probably something that's likely way too complicated to try to enact, but it would be a fun thing to try and accomplish. I'm just not sure where to start.

Aeoli Pera wrote:B.J. wrote:How do you plan to differentiate yourselves from Conservapedia and Rationalwiki, i.e. avoid the reputation as another bunch of cranks and kooks?

Are you aware that this reputation is the result of a CIA operation to tar political opposition as kooks? If this encyclopedia is opposed to globalism and effective, it will be described as kooky, full stop.

I kind of doubt that people view it as kooky because the CIA says so, but rather because it IS kooky. In a frothing-at-the-mouth, hate-filled "die Whitey!" SJW fashion, too.

That is why it is so funny.

On a more serious note, can someone who is an expert on statistics, particularly non parametric stats and mixed models, check the pages in Wiki, correct and import them?

I have to refer to them to get context, because I don't do stats every day, and the results you get will depend on the model... which better fit the data you have, particulary when considering how to impute missing data.

I have seen those who have too much confidence in STATA or (worse) SPSS publish nonsense, claiming significance.

That points out an answer to one of the more obvious questions about the plausibility of Orwell’s 1984: How can they afford that? Is it really fiscally feasible even for a totalitarian government to employ an army of salaried Winston Smiths to alter history?

The feds spend money on anything they deem important, they just haven't got around to funding an army of revisionist historians. From today... http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/10/05/obama-administation-hires-hundreds-pr-staffers-500-million-year/

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that the administration added 667 PR staffers between 2008 and 2011 to bring the staffing total to 5,238; the number decreased since then, but 5,100 staffers remained in the administration in 2014, The Washington Times reported.

The GAO says these figures do not include the $100 million spent on private PR consultants to bolster the government’s PR efforts.

The government spent $800 million on contracts with outside advertising firms in 2015 to promote the administration’s policies, The Washington Times reported.

The name "infogalactic" kind of sucks tbh fam. While it sounds pretty cool it's not immediately obvious that it's an encyclopedia the way Wikipedia is.

Wikipedia sounds like an encyclopedia, Infogalactic sounds like something from scifi. If the goal is to get normies to move over from Wikipedia I think a less skiffy name might work better.

OTOH this could help to rope in nerds, who tbh are probably the lifeblood of a project like this. Who else is going to spend hours writing encyclopedia articles on obscure topics for free, but highly intelligent autists? SJWs, that's who, but thankfully you're entryist wise and the socjus wieners will be ruthlessly purged. Hopefully only the actual nerds will remain.

So I can see why you chose 'Infogalactic'. Besides Starlords and Galaxians are way cooler than admins and editors. "Planetary Knowledge Core" is boss.

Good luck with the project at any rate, the multi-level article system sounds like a good way of containing spin, only trial and error will tell.

That points out an answer to one of the more obvious questions about the plausibility of Orwell’s 1984: How can they afford that? Is it really fiscally feasible even for a totalitarian government to employ an army of salaried Winston Smiths to alter history?

World debt is now 152 Trillion, twice the world economy. With that kind of system, anyone can afford anything.